Friday, March 02, 2012

Kim Dotcom speaks

TV3's Campbell Live played a half hour interview with Kim Dotcom last night, following an earlier interview published yesterday in the NZ Herald. Read the full transcript of the TV3 interview here. It makes for fascinating reading.

JC [John Campbell]: the FBI indictment against you alleges, and I quote, “Copyright infringement on a massive scale with estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of 500 million US dollars”.

KD: Well that’s complete nonsense. If you read the indictment and if you hear what the Prosecution has said in court, it’s at least $500 million of damage were just music files ... just within a two-week time period. So they are actually talking about $13 billion US damage within a year just for music downloads. The entire US music industry is less than $20 billion. So how can one website be, you know, responsible for this amount of damage, it’s completely mind-boggling and unrealistic...."

Kim Dotcom says that "there are a hundred other companies out there that offer the same service like us. Why has not something happened to them?"

He then names some: "Mediafire, Rapidshare, Fileserve, Filesonic. Microsoft has their own service called Skydrive. Google is launching a new service called Drive. Everyone is in this cloud arena, in the same business, has the same problems that we had battling piracy. But we are not responsible for the problem and this is, I think, what everyone needs to understand."

NBR reports that Mr Dotcom's defence revolves around claiming "his company, Megaupload, had too great a volume of traffic to police. It made a best-effort to monitor content, and was not liable for allegedly pirated content....

"Dotcom said last night that 800 files a second were transferred via Megaupload.com... Users were asked to check a box agreeing to terms of service prohibiting copyright infringement. No music or movie company ever attempted to sue Megaupload, Dotcom said."

The wider implications for cloud storage that Dotcom talks about above could affect music services like Apple's iCloud. Or any service you use to store data. It's a fascinating case.

And then there's the aspect of watching the NZ Government bending over backwards to accommodate the US.

NZ is currently involved in secret negotiations around the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) which, from the leaked documents that have emerged, could result in NZ being forced to adopt US intellectual property law amongst others.

"InternetNZ said a proposed chapter in the [TPP] agreement drafted by the US risked "crippling the internet" by preventing internet providers from caching copyright material on their servers without the agreement of copyright owners and would ban the parallel importing of copyright works [ie DVDs], extend the length of copyright and force internet providers to terminate the accounts of customers who repeatedly infringed copyright." Source.